By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 20
A green-iron plant is, first, a construction project – a sealed furnace, a solar field and a power link, built in open desert.
Before Oshivela is a climate story it is a building site: an airtight rotary furnace, a field of solar panels and the cabling that joins them, assembled on bare ground near the Valencia deposit outside Arandis. The electrolysers that arrived on site in November 2024 are heavy plant that had to be delivered, positioned and connected like any other industrial installation, in a place with little around it.
The construction had been under way for a year. Work on the first phase began late in 2023, and by the November installation the project was fitting the components that turn a cleared site into a working plant. What looks like an energy project is, on the ground, a sequence of civil, mechanical and electrical builds in a demanding location.
The furnace is the hard build
The heart of the plant is unusual engineering. Oshivela reduces iron ore inside a sealed, rotating furnace fed with green hydrogen at ambient pressure, which means the vessel must stay airtight while it turns and heats – a tighter tolerance than the open kilns most builders know. Getting that reactor built and sealed correctly is the single most exacting task on the site.
Everything else serves that vessel. The ore handling, the gas lines and the controls all exist to feed and manage a furnace whose integrity decides whether the process works at all, which is why the mechanical build, not the solar array, is the project’s true test.
The sealed furnace is the make-or-break build – the rest of the site is plumbing around it.
A power station built alongside the plant
Oshivela has to generate its own electricity, so the construction is really two projects at once. The first phase installs a 20-megawatt solar photovoltaic array to run the electrolysers, and the design already provides for a far larger later build of about 140 megawatts of solar and 18 megawatts of wind. A factory and a power station are being raised on the same footprint.
That doubles the construction scope. The team is not only erecting process equipment but commissioning generation, mounting structures, inverters and connections, each with its own trades and timelines, all of which must come together before the furnace can run on the power it needs.
This is a factory and a power plant on one slab – two builds sharing a single deadline.
Remoteness sets the programme
The location dictates the difficulty. The site sits in open desert near Arandis, roughly 70 kilometres inland from Swakopmund, so every heavy component, including the electrolysers, travels a long road before it is craned into place. Materials, water and skilled crews all have to be brought to a spot that offers none of them, and a late delivery idles an expensive team.
That remoteness is priced into the whole programme. Durable design and careful sequencing matter more here than speed, because a part that fails or a load that arrives late cannot be replaced from a yard down the street, and standing time in the desert is dear.
The compensations are real, though. The same emptiness that complicates logistics gives the plant flat, cheap, sun-soaked land for its solar field and room to expand toward the far larger later phases without crowding a neighbour, which is precisely why a site this awkward to build on was chosen in the first place.
Distance, not design flourish, writes the build programme for anything raised at Arandis.
The engineering read
For a contractor or engineer, Oshivela is a template as much as a project. If the sealed furnace, the solar array and the hydrogen loop can be built to work together once, at fifteen thousand tonnes, the same package can in principle be repeated and enlarged, which is what the planned million-tonne study assumes. A replicable build is worth more than a bespoke one.
The property risk mirrors the promise. Underbuild the reactor or the power supply and the process stalls; overbuild the first phase and the pilot carries costs it cannot yet justify. The discipline is matching the structure exactly to a plant meant to prove a point.
The winning build is the one that can be raised again, larger, without being redesigned.
For a contractor, an EPC firm or a heavy-industry developer, Oshivela is a preview of where Namibian construction is heading: sealed process plant, on-site renewable generation and remote desert logistics, all on one site. The decision it puts to the sector is whether to build the repeatable green-industrial template the country will need, or to treat each such plant as a costly one-off assembled from scratch.
Sources: HyIron – Oshivela electrolysers; Namibia starts work on Africa’s biggest green steel plant at Arandis (The Extractor); Green Hydrogen – the Namibian economy guide (Economy.com.na)
